Abstract

This dissertation is a study of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of temporal awareness, or time-consciousness. Its starting point is the complex concept of time-consciousness that Husserl formulated in the period 1929--1934, during which he gave to this kind of consciousness the name "living present". The dissertation does not consider Husserl's writings from this period, apart from the first two Cartesian Meditations, in themselves; it relies instead on the presentation that was made of these in 1966 by Klaus Held, and extracts from this latter five characterizations of the "living present" and the problems that they involve. These are: its "primordial passivity"; its character of being "pre-reflexive"; its character of being "proto-temporal", rather than being a temporal entity in the sense that the temporal objects of reflection or of ordinary perception are said to be temporal; the characterization of "impression", when it is a part of the living present, as a "primordial sensuous impressional flux"; and its characters of being both a "streaming" present and a "standing" present, a "now that stands still", with the resulting problem of its unity. The dissertation attempts to contribute to the explication of these components of the concept of the living present by considering a limited number of earlier texts from the period 1904--1928, both texts that were published during Husserl's lifetime and related manuscripts. In its analyses and interpretations the study tries to follow lines of investigation already established in Husserl scholarship in recent decades, above all in the work of John Barnett Brough and Donn Welton. It will argue that the functioning of "retention" within the living present---as opposed to the sensuous impressional flux as the primordial sensuous "material" that is the basis for the synthetic production of sensuous unity---cannot be explained on the phenomenologically given basis of sensous "elementary material" at all. In the last chapter it considers the problem of the unity of the living present from the standpoint of Brough's formulation of the difference between the transverse and horizontal intentionalities; of inner time-consciousness